Traditional satellite infrastructure has relied on the use of a small number of large, powerful satellites that generally use custom operating systems and point-to-point communication links. However, these large, powerful satellites are expensive to build and deploy.
Over the years, a growing interest in reducing satellite manufacture and deployment costs has lead to the development of small factor satellites. Small factor satellites can be deployed in low earth orbit. Small factor satellites include but not limited to nano-satellites. Small factor satellites are hereinafter referred to as cubesats. Due to their smaller size, cubesats generally cost less to build and deploy into orbit above the Earth. As a result, cubesats present opportunities for educational institutions, governments, and commercial entities to launch and deploy cubesats for a variety of purposes with fewer costs compared to traditional, large satellites.
The use of a large constellation of independent small satellites allows for greatly reduced revisit time and message latency. However, operating the large constellation of independent satellites in earth orbit has many direct challenges in data collection, management, local processing and transmission, and imposes higher flexibility and coordination requirements. For example, existing technology for small form factor satellites, like present day cubesat space protocol (CSP), mimic traditional communication protocols. This can make it difficult to distinguish signals from individual satellites when contact regions overlap. Further, because sensor data for a particular region spreads across multiple satellites, and further because reduced power budgets limit transmission bandwidth, coordinating data retrieval becomes a much more complex task under existing systems.
Therefore, there is a need for a fast, cost-efficient, and simple mechanism to coordinate and transmit information in and across an orbital network.